The Challenge

A secret recipe of spices sets sausage-maker Odom's Tennessee
Pride apart from its competitors. Its logistics operations set it
apart from many other companies that need to provide RFID shipping
labels to comply with customer requirements.

Tennessee Pride uses a dedicated cold-storage
third-party-logistics provider to distribute its products to retail
customers. The 3PL did not have any RFID capabilities, which
required Tennessee Pride to develop its own system to tag cases and
cartons before they were transferred to the 3PL.

"We investigated, and found it would cost us more in the
long-term to outsource our RFID labeling.We knew it was best to
bring RFID capability into our plant," said Hader. "We
were interested in using RFID not only to meet the mandate, but also
to improve our own processes."

That brought a new set of challenges, because plant operations
were already highly automated and efficient, so the RFID system had
to fit in without slowing things down. Tennessee Pride runs
production for two shifts, then tears down and cleans its lines
during the third. The lines are in constant use, so there is no time
available to shut down to test and troubleshoot RFID configurations.

"We looked for a partner who could provide a reliable,
scalable system and bring in vendors with world-class capabilities
to fit into a large-scale IT infrastructure and cause minimal change
to the processes we already had in place," said Hader.

The Solution

Rush Tracking System provided the integration and engineering
expertise, and relied on Zebra Technologies to provide world-class,
reliable and integration- friendly RFID printer/encoders.

Rush integrated Zebra's R110XiIIIPlus™ printer/encoders and RFID
middleware from OATSystems into Tennessee Pride's production lines
and industrial control system. The system passes data from Tennessee
Pride's ERP applications to an R110XiIIIPlus on the production line,
which generates a carton label with barcode and human readable
information plus an EPCglobal Gen 2-standard RFID tag. An automated
applicator from Weber Marking Systems applies the smart label to the
moving carton at production speeds.

"This system is unusual because it can handle regular
orders that are interspersed with orders that require RFID
labeling," said Toby Rush, president of Rush Tracking Systems.
"We used enterprise-class components to get the speed,
scalability and reliability Tennessee Pride needed for its highly
automated environment."

After cartons are automatically labeled, the legacy conveyor and
industrial control systems route them to the appropriate palletizing
station. Once the pallet has been robotically stacked and wrapped,
workers use a cart-mounted R110XiIIIPlus to produce the pallet
label, which is hand-applied. Labeled pallets are then brought
through an RFID portal reader from Motorola for order validation
prior to releasing them for shipment.

"The printer/encoder integration went very smooth because
Zebra is such a well-known standard," said Hader.
"Practically everybody—production control systems, industrial
controllers, software—talks to Zebra® printers. There is more
interface support for Zebra than you find for lesser-known brands,
which helped our integration."

Results

Tennessee Pride met its goal of compliance without compromise.
Legacy operations continue to run as quickly and efficiently as
before, and the RFID system is running even more smoothly than Hader expected.

"With Rush Tracking as our partner, we were able to develop
a strategy that let us implement the technology with minimal
downtime to our operations and create a scalable system that is
friendly to our operations and to our users in the plant," he
said. "The Rush team did a great job on system engineering and
in bringing all the components together, and the Zebra printers have
done a tremendous job for us."

Tennessee Pride is also meeting its goal of using RFID to
improve operations.

"One of the ways Tennessee Pride attempts to be a leader in
food safety and quality is through our use of technology.We are
using the data we get from our RFID system, and we are always
looking for ways we can improve our processes and the technology
that our processes depend upon," said Hader.